Page 4059 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 26 November 2014
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We just had a motion on White Ribbon Day. A lot of the jobs in the hospitality sector are part time. They suit women and families; they suit young women getting into the workforce; they suit women returning to the workforce. The opportunity to expand and have a new convention centre, which would bring with it extra accommodation, leads to jobs, particularly for women. But no. This is the Treasurer, the tourism minister, who thinks that the current convention centre is adequate and that his government does not have a great deal to do with it—that it is just a private sector initiative.
That flies in the face of what is going on around this country. There was South Australian government support for the expansion of the Adelaide Convention Centre. The expansion there is actually bigger than the proposed Australia forum. The fact that the New South Wales government is backing the total knock down and rebuild of the Darling Harbour convention centre and the Victorian government is backing doubling the size of the Melbourne convention centre says that this is a government, and a minister in particular, that is out of sync with reality.
Key support sectors, notably tourism? Not so sure on that one. Construction? What is the construction industry? The property industry, the construction industry, whether it be small builders or big builders—what are their problems? Their problems are things like DV306 and the lease variation charge. They were ignored on DV306; they were ignored on the lease variation charge; they were ignored on commence and complete. That is the problem. To say that they support key sectors of the economy, particularly in construction, is simply a joke.
You only have to look at how badly lease variation has performed for this Treasurer. It is rapidly becoming his mining tax—all promise and absolutely no delivery. I am sure that members would be interested to know that the actual outcome in 2013-14 for the lease variation charge was $14,203,000. When it was first touted back in the 2012-13 budget, it was meant to be $24 million. We have received almost half of what it was meant to give. In 2014-15, it was meant to be $26,365,000; that was rapidly downgraded to $14,580,000. This tax is a disaster. In the year to date, 2014-15, in the first quarter, it failed miserably. It only raised 1.3 million out of 3.6 million, 62 per cent below target.
This is the tax reform that the minister touts to be supporting the construction industry. In fact, it is hindering it. That is the reality when you have been there too long: you are out of touch and you do not understand how these industries work.
Let me go to part (viii), “reforming taxes”. Yes, they are reforming taxes, but they did not tell people they would triple the rates to pay for that. The commercial sector missed out on the first year of reforms, but they have been hit since then. We know that the policies of this government are hindering housing affordability, and we know that it is stopping construction.
Manhattan recently won the Australian property industry award for the development of the year. Manhattan was approved under the old system; it would not have gone ahead under the lease variation charge, because it would have been uneconomic. That is the sort of reform that Ms Porter thinks is good and that she touts as supporting key sectors of the ACT economy—for instance, construction.
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